"Die Botschaft
hör’ ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der
Glaube."

(Goethe.)

Never before in the history of the church has the
origin of Christianity, with its original documents, been so thoroughly
examined from standpoints entirely opposite as in the present
generation. It has engaged the time and energy of many of the ablest
scholars and critics. Such is the importance and the power of that
little book which "contains the wisdom of the whole world," that it
demands ever new investigation and sets serious minds of all shades of
belief and unbelief in motion, as if their very life depended upon its
acceptance or rejection. There is not a fact or doctrine which has not
been thoroughly searched. The whole life of Christ, and the labors and
writings of the apostles with their tendencies, antagonisms, and
reconciliations are theoretically reproduced among scholars and
reviewed under all possible aspects. The post-apostolic age has by
necessary connection been drawn into the process of investigation and
placed in a new light.

The great biblical scholars among the Fathers were
chiefly concerned in drawing from the sacred records the catholic
doctrines of salvation, and the precepts for a holy life; the Reformers
and older Protestant divines studied them afresh with special zeal for
the evangelical tenets which separated them from the Roman church; but
all stood on the common ground of a reverential belief in the divine
inspiration and authority of the Scriptures. The present age is
preëminently historical and critical. The Scriptures are
subjected to the same process of investigation and analysis as any
other literary production of antiquity, with no other purpose than to
ascertain the real facts in the case. We want to know the precise
origin, gradual growth, and final completion of Christianity as an
historical phenomenon in organic connection with contemporary events
and currents of thought. The whole process through which it passed from
the manger in Bethlehem to the cross of Calvary, and from the upper
room in Jerusalem to the throne of the Caesars is to be reproduced,
explained and understood according to the laws of regular historical
development. And in this critical process the very foundations of the
Christian faith have been assailed and undermined, so that the question
now is, "to be or not to be." The remark of Goethe is as profound as it
is true: "The conflict of faith and unbelief remains the proper, the
only, the deepest theme of the history of the world and mankind, to
which all others are subordinated."

The modern critical movement began, we may say,
about 1830, is still in full progress, and is likely to continue to the
end of the nineteenth century, as the apostolic church itself extended
over a period of seventy years before it had developed its resources.
It was at first confined to Germany (Strauss, Baur, and the
Tübingen School), then spread to France (Renan) and Holland
(Scholten, Kuenen), and last to England ("Supernatural Religion") and
America, so that the battle now extends along the whole line of
Protestantism.

There are two kinds of biblical criticism, verbal
and historical.

Textual Criticism.

The verbal or textual criticism has for its object to
restore as far as possible the original text of the Greek Testament
from the oldest and most trustworthy sources, namely, the uncial
manuscripts (especially, the Vatican and Sinaitic), the ante-Nicene
versions, and the patristic quotations. In this respect our age has
been very successful, with the aid of most important discoveries of
ancient manuscripts. By the invaluable labors of Lachmann, who broke
the path for the correct theory (Novum Testament. Gr., 1831,
large Graeco-Latin edition, 1842–50, 2 vols.),
Tischendorf (8th critical ed., 1869–72, 2 vols.),
Tregelles (1857, completed 1879), Westcott and Hort (1881, 2 vols.), we
have now in the place of the comparatively late and corrupt textus
receptus of Erasmus and his followers (Stephens, Beza, and the
Elzevirs), which is the basis of au Protestant versions in common use,
a much older and purer text, which must henceforth be made the basis of
all revised translations. After a severe struggle between the
traditional and the progressive schools there is now in this basal
department of biblical learning a remarkable degree of harmony among
critics. The new text is in fact the older text, and the reformers are
in this case the restorers. Far from unsettling the faith in the New
Testament, the results have established the substantial integrity of
the text, notwithstanding the one hundred and fifty thousand readings
which have been gradually gathered from all sources. It is a noteworthy
fact that the greatest textual critics of the nineteenth century are
believers, not indeed in a mechanical or magical inspiration, which is
untenable and not worth defending, but in the divine origin and
authority of the canonical writings, which rest on fax stronger grounds
than any particular human theory of inspiration.

Historical Criticism.

The historical or inner criticism (which the Germans
call the "higher criticism," höhere Kritik) deals with the origin, spirit, and aim
of the New Testament writings, their historical environments, and
organic place in the great intellectual and religious process which
resulted in the triumphant establishment of the catholic church of the
second century. It assumed two very distinct shapes under the lead of
Dr. Neander in Berlin (d. 1850), and Dr. Baur in Tübingen (d. 1860), who labored
in the mines of church history at a respectful distance from each other
and never came into personal contact. Neander and Baur were giants,
equal in genius and learning, honesty and earnestness, but widely
different in spirit. They gave a mighty impulse to historical study and
left a long line of pupils and independent followers who carry on the
historico-critical reconstruction of primitive Christianity. Their
influence is felt in France, Holland and England. Neander published the
first edition of his Apostolic Age in 1832, his Life of
Jesus (against Strauss) in 1837 (the first volume of his General
Church History had appeared already in 1825, revised ed. 1842); Baur
wrote his essay on the Corinthian Parties in 1831, his critical
investigations on the canonical Gospels in 1844 and 1847, his
"Paul" in 1845 (second ed. by Zeller, 1867), and his "Church
History of the First Three Centuries" in 1853 (revised 1860). His
pupil Strauss had preceded him with his first Leben Jesu (1835),
which created a greater sensation than any of the works mentioned,
surpassed only by that of Renan’s Vie de
Jésus, nearly thirty years later (1863). Renan
reproduces and popularizes Strauss and Baur for the French public with
independent learning and brilliant genius, and the author of
"Supernatural Religion" reëchoes the
Tübingen and Leyden speculations in England. On the
other hand Bishop Lightfoot, the leader of conservative criticism;
declares that he has learnt more from the German Neander than from any
recent theologian ("Contemp. Review" for 1875, p. 866. Matthew Arnold says (Literature and Dogma,
Preface, p. xix.): "To get the facts, the data, in all matters of
science, but notably in theology and Biblical learning, one goes to
Germany. Germany, and it is her high honor, has searched out the facts
and exhibited them. And without knowledge of the facts, no clearness or
fairness of mind can in any study do anything; this cannot be laid down
too rigidly." But he denies to the Germans "quickness and delicacy of
perception." Something more is necessary than learning and perception
to draw the right conclusions from the facts: sound common sense and
well-balanced judgment. And when we deal with sacred and supernatural
facts, we need first and last a reverential spirit and that faith which
is the organ of the supernatural. It is here where the two schools
depart, without difference of nationality; for faith is not a national
but an individual gift.

The Two Antagonistic Schools.

The two theories of the apostolic history, introduced
by Neander and Baur, are antagonistic in principle and aim, and united
only by the moral bond of an honest search for truth. The one is
conservative and reconstructive, the other radical and destructive. The
former accepts the canonical Gospels and Acts as honest, truthful, and
credible memoirs of the life of Christ and the labors of the apostles;
the latter rejects a great part of their contents as unhistorical myths
or legends of the post-apostolic age, and on the other hand gives undue
credit to wild heretical romances of the second century. The one draws
an essential line of distinction between truth as maintained by the
orthodox church, and error as held by heretical parties; the other
obliterates the lines and puts the heresy into the inner camp of the
apostolic church itself. The one proceeds on the basis of faith in God
and Christ, which implies faith in the supernatural and miraculous
wherever it is well attested; the other proceeds from disbelief in the
supernatural and miraculous as a philosophical impossibility, and tries
to explain the gospel history and the apostolic history from purely
natural causes like every other history. The one has a moral and
spiritual as well is intellectual interest in the New Testament, the
other a purely intellectual and critical interest. The one approaches
the historical investigation with the subjective experience of the
divine truth in the heart and conscience, and knows and feels
Christianity to be a power of salvation from sin and error; the other
views it simply as the best among the many religions which are destined
to give way at last to the sovereignty of reason and philosophy. The
controversy turns on the question whether there is a God in History or
not; as the contemporaneous struggle in natural science turns on the
question whether there is a God in nature or not. Belief in a personal
God almighty and omnipresent in history and in nature, implies the
possibility of supernatural and miraculous revelation. Absolute freedom
from prepossession (Voraussetzungslosigkeit such as Strauss
demanded) is absolutely impossible, "ex nihilo nihil fit." There is prepossession on either
side of the controversy, the one positive, the other negative, and
history itself must decide between them. The facts must rule
philosophy, not philosophy the facts. If it can be made out that the
life of Christ and the apostolic church can be psychologically and
historically explained only by the admission of the supernatural
element which they claim, while every other explanation only increases
the difficulty, of the problem and substitutes an unnatural miracle for
a supernatural one, the historian has gained the case, and it is for
the philosopher to adjust his theory to history. The duty of the
historian is not to make the facts, but to discover them, and then to
construct his theory wide enough to give them all comfortable room.

The Alleged Antagonism in the Apostolic
Church.

The theory of the Tübingen school starts
from the assumption of a fundamental antagonism between Jewish or
primitive Christianity represented by Peter, and Gentile or progressive
Christianity represented by Paul, and resolves all the writings of the
New Testament into tendency writings (Tendenzschriften), which give us not history
pure and simple, but adjust it to a doctrinal and practical aim in the
interest of one or the other party, or of a compromise between the
two.243243 In this respect Baur differs
from the standpoint of Strauss, who in his first Leben
Jesu(1835) bad represented the gospel history as an innocent and
unconscious myth or poem of the religious imagination of the second
generation of Christians; but in his second Leben Jesu(1864) he
somewhat modified his view, and at last (1873) he gave up the whole
problem as a bad job. A tendency writing implies more or less conscious
fiction and falsification of history. The Tübingen critics,
however, try to relieve this fictitious literature of the odious
feature by referring us to the Jewish and Christian apocryphal
literature which was passed off under honored names without giving any
special offence on that score. The Epistles of Paul to the Galatians, Romans,
First and Second Corinthians—which are admitted to be
genuine beyond any doubt, exhibit the anti-Jewish and universal
Christianity, of which Paul himself must be regarded as the chief
founder. The Apocalypse, which was composed by the apostle John in 69,
exhibits the original Jewish and contracted Christianity, in accordance
with his position as one of the "pillar"-apostles of the circumcision
(Gal.
2:9), and it is the only
authentic document of the older apostles.

Baur (Gesch. der christl. Kirche, I., 80
sqq.) and Renan (St. Paul, ch. X.) go so far as to assert that
this genuine John excludes Paul from the list of the apostles (Apoc.
21:14, which leaves no room
for more than twelve), and indirectly attacks him as a "false Jew"
(Apoc. 2:9; 3:9), a "false apostle" (2:2), a "false prophet" (2:20), as "Balaam" (2:2, 6,
14, 15; comp. Jude 11; 2 Pet. 2:15); just as the Clementine Homilies assail
him under the name of Simon the Magician and arch-heretic. Renan
interprets also the whole Epistle of Jude, a brother of James, as an
attack upon Paul, issued from Jerusalem in connection with the Jewish
counter-mission organized by James, which nearly ruined the work of
Paul.

The other writings of the New Testament are
post-apostolic productions and exhibit the various phases of a
unionistic movement, which resulted in the formation of the orthodox
church of the second and third centuries. The Acts of the Apostles is a
Catholic Irenicon which harmonizes Jewish and Gentile Christianity by
liberalizing Peter and contracting or Judaizing Paul, and concealing
the difference between them; and though probably based on an earlier
narrative of Luke, it was not put into its present shape before the
close of the first century. The canonical Gospels, whatever may have
been the earlier records on which they are based, are likewise
post-apostolic, and hence untrustworthy as historical narratives. The
Gospel of John is a purely ideal composition of some unknown Gnostic or
mystic of profound religious genius, who dealt with the historic Jesus
as freely as Plato in his Dialogues dealt with Socrates, and who
completed with consummate literary skill this unifying process in the
age of Hadrian, certainly not before the third decade of the second
century. Baur brought it down as late as 170; Hilgenfeld put it further
back to 140, Keim to 130, Renan to the age of Hadrian.

Thus the whole literature of the New Testament is
represented as the living growth of a century, as a collection of
polemical and irenical tracts of the apostolic and post-apostolic ages.
Instead of contemporaneous, reliable history we have a series of
intellectual movements and literary fictions. Divine revelation gives
way to subjective visions and delusions, inspiration is replaced by
development, truth by a mixture of truth and error. The apostolic
literature is put on a par with the controversial literature of the
Nicene age, which resulted in the Nicene orthodoxy, or with the
literature of the Reformation period, which led to the formation of the
Protestant system of doctrine.

History never repeats itself, yet the same laws
and tendencies reappear in ever-changing forms. This modern criticism
is a remarkable renewal of the views held by heretical schools in the
second century. The Ebionite author of the pseudo-Clementine Homilies
and the Gnostic Marcion likewise assumed an irreconcilable antagonism
between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, with this difference, that the
former opposed Paul as the arch-heretic and defamer of Peter, while
Marcion (about 140) regarded Paul as the only true apostle, and the
older apostles as Jewish perverters of Christianity; consequently he
rejected the whole Old Testament and such books of the New Testament as
he considered Judaizing, retaining in his canon only a mutilated Gospel
of Luke and ton of the Pauline Epistles (excluding the Pastoral
Epistles and the Epistle to the Hebrews). In the eyes of modern
criticism these wild heretics are better historians of the apostolic
age than the author of the Acts of the Apostles.

The Gnostic heresy, with all its destructive
tendency, had an important mission as a propelling force in the ancient
church and left its effects upon patristic theology. So also this
modern gnosticism must be allowed to have done great service to
biblical and historical learning by removing old prejudices, opening
new avenues of thought, bringing to light the immense fermentation of
the first century, stimulating research, and compelling an entire
scientific reconstruction of the history of the origin of Christianity
and the church. The result will be a deeper and fuller knowledge, not
to the weakening but to the strengthening of our faith.

Reaction.

There is considerable difference among the scholars
of this higher criticism, and while some pupils of Baur (e.g. Strauss,
Volkmar) have gone even beyond his positions, others make concessions
to the traditional views. A most important change took place in
Baur’s own mind as regards the conversion of Paul,
which he confessed at last, shortly before his death (1860), to be to
him an insolvable psychological problem amounting to a miracle.
Ritschl, Holtzmann, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, and especially Reuss,
Weizsäcker, and Keim (who are as free from orthodox
prejudices as the most advanced critics) have modified and corrected
many of the extreme views of the Tübingen school. Even Hilgenfeld, with all his zeal for the
"Fortschrittstheologie" and against the
"Rückschrittstheologie," admits seven instead of four
Pauline Epistles as genuine, assigns an earlier date to the Synoptical
Gospels and the Epistle to the Hebrews (which he supposes to have been
written by Apollos before 70), and says: "It cannot be denied that
Baur’s criticism went beyond the bounds of moderation
and inflicted too deep wounds on the faith of the church" (Hist.
Krit. Einleitung in das N. T. 1875, p. 197). Renan admits nine
Pauline Epistles, the essential genuineness of the Acts, and even the,
narrative portions of John, while he rejects the discourses as
pretentious, inflated, metaphysical, obscure, and tiresome! (See his
last discussion of the subject in L’église
chrétienne, ch. I-V. pp. 45 sqq.) Matthew Arnold
and other critics reverse the proposition and accept the discourses as
the sublimest of all human compositions, full of "heavenly glories"
(himmlische Herrlichkeiten, to use an expression of Keim, who,
however, rejects the fourth Gospel altogether). Schenkel (in his
Christusbild der Apostel, 1879)
considerably moderates the antagonism between Petrinism and Paulinism,
and confesses (Preface, p. xi.) that in the progress of his
investigations he has been "forced to the conviction that the Acts of
the Apostles is a more trustworthy source of information than is
commonly allowed on the part of the modern criticism; that older
documents worthy of credit, besides the well known We-source
(Wirquelle) are contained in it; and that the Paulinist who
composed it has not intentionally distorted the facts, but only placed
them in the light in which they appeared to him and must have appeared
to him from the time and circumstances under which he wrote. He has
not, in my opinion, artificially brought upon the stage either a
Paulinized Peter, or a Petrinized Paul, in order to mislead his
readers, but has portrayed the two apostles just as he actually
conceived of them on the basis of his incomplete information." Keim, in
his last work (Aus dem Urchristenthum, 1878, a year before his
death), has come to a similar conclusion, and proves (in a critical
essay on the Apostelkonvent, pp. 64–89) in
opposition to Baur, Schwegler, and Zeller, yet from the same standpoint
of liberal criticism, and allowing later additions, the substantial
harmony between the Acts and the Epistle to the Galatians as regards
the apostolic conference and concordat of Jerusalem. Ewald always
pursued his own way and equalled Baur in bold and arbitrary criticism,
but violently opposed him and defended the Acts and the Gospel of
John.

To these German voices we may add the testimony of
Matthew Arnold, one of the boldest and broadest of the broad-school
divines and critics, who with all his admiration for Baur represents
him as an "unsafe guide," and protests against his assumption of a
bitter hatred of Paul and the pillar-apostles as entirely inconsistent
with the conceded religious greatness of Paul and with the nearness of
the pillar-apostles to Jesus (God and the Bible, 1875, Preface,
vii-xii). As to the fourth Gospel, which is now the most burning spot
of this burning controversy, the same author, after viewing it from
without and from within, comes to the conclusion that it is, "no
fancy-piece, but a serious and invaluable document, full of incidents
given by tradition and genuine ’sayings of the
Lord’ "(p. 370), and that "after the most free
criticism has been fairly and strictly applied,... there is yet left an
authentic residue comprising all the profoundest, most important, and
most beautiful things in the fourth Gospel" (p. 372 sq.).

The Positive School.

While there are signs of disintegration in the ranks
of destructive criticism, the historic truth and genuineness of the New
Testament writings have found learned and able defenders from different
standpoints, such as Neander, Ullmann, C. F. Schmid (the colleague of
Baur in Tübingen), Rothe, Dorner, Ebrard, Lechler, Lange,
Thiersch, Wieseler, Hofmann (of Erlangen), Luthardt, Christlieb,
Beyschlag, Uhlhorn, Weiss, Godet, Edm. de Pressensé.

The English and American mind also has fairly
begun to grapple manfully and successfully, with these questions in
such scholars as Lightfoot, Plumptre, Westcott, Sanday, Farrar, G. P.
Fisher, Ezra Abbot (on the Authorship of the Fourth Gospel,
1880). English and American theology is not likely to be extensively
demoralized by these hypercritical speculations of the Continent. It
has a firmer foothold in an active church life and the convictions and
affections of the people. The German and French mind, like the
Athenian, is always bent upon telling and hearing something new, while
the Anglo-American mind cares more for what is true, whether it be old
or new. And the truth must ultimately prevail.

St. Paul’s Testimony to
Historical Christianity.

Fortunately even the most exacting school of modern
criticism leaves us a fixed fulcrum from which we can argue the truth
of Christianity, namely, the four Pauline Epistles to the Galatians,
Romans, and Corinthians, which are pronounced to be unquestionably
genuine and made the Archimedean point of assault upon the other parts
of the New Testament. We propose to confine ourselves to them. They are
of the utmost historical as well as doctrinal importance; they
represent the first Christian generation, and were written between 54
and 58, that is within a quarter of the century after the crucifixion,
when the older apostles and most of the principal eye-witnesses of the
life of Christ were still alive. The writer himself was a contemporary
of Christ; he lived in Jerusalem at the time of the great events on
which Christianity rests; he was intimate with the Sanhedrin and the
murderers of Christ; he was not blinded by favorable prejudice, but was
a violent persecutor, who had every motive to justify his hostility;
and after his radical conversion (a.d. 37) he
associated with the original disciples and could learn their personal
experience from their own lips (Gal. 1:18;
2:1–11).

Now in these admitted documents of the best
educated of the apostles we have the clearest evidence of all the great
events and truths of primitive Christianity, and a satisfactory answer
to the chief objections and difficulties of modern skepticism.244244 Comp. here a valuable article
of J. Oswald Dykes, in the "Brit. and For. Evang. Review," Lond. 1880,
pp. 51 sqq.

They prove

1. The leading facts in the life of Christ, his
divine mission, his birth from a woman, of the royal house of David,
his holy life and example, his betrayal, passion, and death for the
sins of the world, his resurrection on the third day, his repeated
manifestations to the disciples, his ascension and exaltation to the
right hand of God, whence he will return to judge mankind, the
adoration of Christ as the Messiah, the Lord and Saviour from sin, the
eternal Son of God; also the election of the Twelve, the institution of
baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the mission of the Holy
Spirit, the founding of the church. Paul frequently alludes to these
facts, especially the crucifixion and resurrection, not in the way of a
detailed narrative, but incidentally and in connection with doctrinal
expositions arid exhortations as addressed to men already familiar with
them from oral preaching and instruction. Comp. Gal 3:13; 4:4–6; 6:14; Rom. 1:3; 4:24, 25; 5:8–21;
6:3–10; 8:3–11, 26, 39; 9:5; 10:6, 7;
14:5; 15:3 1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2, 12; 5:7; 6:14;
10:16; 11:23–26; 15:3–8,
45–49; 2 Cor.
5:21.

2. Paul’s own conversion and call
to the apostleship by the personal appearance to him of the exalted
Redeemer from heaven. Gal. 1:1, 15, 16; 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8.

3. The origin and rapid progress of the Christian
church in all parts of the Roman empire, from Jerusalem to Antioch and
Rome, in Judaea, in Syria, in Asia Minor, in Macedonia and Achaia. The
faith of the Roman church, he says, was known "throughout the world,"
and "in every place "there were worshippers of Jesus as their Lord. And
these little churches maintained a lively and active intercourse with
each other, and though founded by different teachers and distracted by
differences of opinion and practice, they worshipped the same divine
Lord, and formed one brotherhood of believers. Gal.
1:2, 22; 2:1, 11; Rom. 1:8; 10:18; 16:26; 1 Cor. 1:12; 8:1; 16:19, etc.

4. The presence of miraculous powers in the church
at that time. Paul himself wrought the signs and mighty deeds of an
apostle. Rom. 15:18, 19; 1 Cor. 2:4; 9:2; 2 Cor. 12:12. He lays,
however, no great stress on the outer sensible miracles, and makes more
account of the inner moral miracles and the constant manifestations of
the power of the Holy Spirit in regenerating and sanctifying sinful men
in an utterly corrupt state of society. 1 Cor. 12
to 14; 6:9–11; Gal.
5:16–26;
Rom. 6
and 8.

5. The existence of much earnest controversy in
these young churches, not indeed about the great facts on which their
faith was based, and which were fully admitted on both sides, but about
doctrinal and ritual inferences from these facts, especially the
question of the continued obligation of circumcision and the Mosaic
law, and the personal question of the apostolic authority of Paul. The
Judaizers maintained the superior claims of the older apostles and
charged him with a radical departure from the venerable religion of
their fathers; while Paul used against them the argument that the
expiatory death of Christ and his resurrection were needless and
useless if justification came from the law. Gal. 2:21;
5:2–4.

6. The essential doctrinal and spiritual harmony
of Paul with the elder apostles, notwithstanding their differences of
standpoint and field of labor. Here the testimony of the Epistle to the
Galatians
2:1–10,
which is the very bulwark of the skeptical school, bears strongly
against it. For Paul expressly states that the, "pillar"-apostles of
the circumcision, James, Peter, and John, at the conference in
Jerusalem a.d. 50, approved the gospel he had
been preaching during the preceding fourteen years; that they "imparted
nothing" to him, gave him no new instruction, imposed on him no now
terms, nor burden of any kind, but that, on the contrary, they
recognized the grace of God in him and his special mission to the
Gentiles, and gave him and Barnabas "the right hands of fellowship" in
token of their brotherhood and fidelity. He makes a clear and sharp
distinction between the apostles and "the false brethren privily
brought in, who came to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ
Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage," and to whom he would not
yield, "no, not for an hour." The hardest words he has for the Jewish
apostles are epithets of honor; he calls them, the pillars of the
church, "the men in high repute" (οἱ
στῦλοι, οἱ
δοκοῦντες, Gal. 2:6, 9); while he considered himself in sincere
humility "the least of the apostles," because he persecuted the church
of God (1 Cor. 15:9).

This statement of Paul makes it simply impossible
and absurd to suppose (with Baur, Schwegler, Zeller, and Renan) that
John should have so contradicted and stultified himself as to attack,
in the Apocalypse, the same Paul whom he had recognized as a brother
during his life, as a false apostle and chief of the synagogue of Satan
after his death. Such a reckless and monstrous assertion turns either
Paul or John into a liar. The antinomian and antichristian heretics of
the Apocalypse who plunged into all sorts of moral and ceremonial
pollutions (Apoc. 2:14, 15)
would have been condemned by Paul as much as by John; yea, he himself,
in his parting address to the Ephesian elders, had prophetically
foreannounced and described such teachers as "grievous wolves" that
would after his departure enter in among them or rise from the midst of
them, not sparing the flock (Acts 20:29, 30). On the question of fornication he was
in entire harmony with the teaching of the Apocalypse (1 Cor. 3:15, 16;
6:15–20);
and as to the question of eating meat offered in sacrifice to idols
Gr215(rA fi8coX6zvra), though he regarded
it as a thing indifferent in itself, considering the vanity of idols,
yet he condemned it whenever it gave offence to the weak consciences of
the more scrupulous Jewish converts (1 Cor. 8:7–13;
10:23–33;
Rom.
14:2, 21); and this was in
accord with the decree of the Apostolic Council (Acts 15:29).

7. Paul’s collision with Peter at
Antioch, Gal. 2:11–14. which is made the very bulwark of
the Tübingen theory, proves the very reverse. For it was not
a difference in principle and doctrine; on the contrary, Paul expressly
asserts that Peter at first freely and habitually (mark the imperfect
συνήσθιεν, Gal. 2:12) associated with the Gentile converts as
brethren in Christ, but was intimidated by emissaries from the bigoted
Jewish converts in Jerusalem and acted against his better conviction
which he had entertained ever since the vision at Joppa (Acts
10:10–16),
and which he had so boldly confessed at the Council in Jerusalem (Acts 15:7–11) and carried out in Antioch. We
have here the same impulsive, impressible, changeable disciple, the
first to confess and the first to deny his Master, yet quickly
returning to him in bitter repentance and sincere humility. It is for
this inconsistency of conduct, which Paul called by the strong term of
dissimulation or hypocrisy, that he, in his uncompromising zeal for the
great principle of Christian liberty, reproved him publicly before the
church. A public wrong had to be publicly rectified. According to the
Tübingen hypothesis the hypocrisy would have been in the
very opposite conduct of Peter. The silent submission of Peter on the
occasion proves his regard for his younger colleague, and speaks as
much to his praise as his weakness to his blame. That the alienation
was only temporary and did not break up their fraternal relation is
apparent from the respectful though frank manner in which, several
years after the occurrence, they allude to each other as fellow
apostles, Comp. Gal. 1:18, 19; 2:8, 9; 1 Cor. 9:5; 2 Pet. 3:15, 16, and from the fact that Mark and Silas
were connecting links between them and alternately served them both.245245 It is amusing to read
Renan’s account of this dispute (St. Paul, ch.
x.). He sympathizes rather with Peter, whom he calls a "man profoundly
kind and upright and desiring peace above all things," though he admits
him to have been amiably weak and inconsistent on that as on other
occasions; while he charges Paul with stubbornness and rudeness; but
what is the most important point, he denies the Tübingen
exegesis when he says: "Modern critics who infer from certain passages
of the Epistle to the Galatians that the rupture between Peter and Paul
was absolute, put themselves in contradiction not only to the Acts, but
to other passages of the Epistle to the Galatians (1:18; 2:2). Fervent
men pass their lives disputing together without ever falling out. We
must not judge these characters after the manner of things which take
place in our day between people well-bred and susceptible in a point of
honor. This last word especially never had much significance with the
Jews!"

The Epistle to the Galatians then furnishes the
proper solution of the difficulty, and essentially confirms the account
of the Acts. It proves the harmony as well as the difference between
Paul and the older apostles. It explodes the hypothesis that they stood
related to each other like the Marcionites and Ebionites in the second
century. These were the descendants of the heretics of the
apostolic age, of the "false brethren insidiously brought in" (Ψευδάδελφοι
παρείσακτοι, Gal. 2:4); while the true apostles recognized and
continued to recognize the same grace of God which wrought effectually
through Peter for the conversion of the Jews, and through Paul for the
conversion of the Gentiles. That the Judaizers should have appealed to
the Jewish apostles, and the antinomian Gnostics to Paul, as their
authority, is not more surprising than the appeal of the modern
rationalists to Luther and the Reformation.

We have thus discussed at the outset, and at some
length, the fundamental difference of the two standpoints from which
the history of the apostolic church is now viewed, and have vindicated
our own general position in this controversy.

It is not to be supposed that all the obscure
points have already been satisfactorily cleared up, or ever will be
solved beyond the possibility of dispute. There must be some room left
for faith in that God who has revealed himself clearly enough in nature
and in history to strengthen our faith, and who is concealed enough to
try our faith. Certain interstellar spaces will always be vacant in the
firmament of the apostolic age that men may gaze all the more intensely
at the bright stars, before which the post-apostolic books disappear
like torches. A careful study of the ecclesiastical writers of the
second and third centuries, and especially of the numerous Apocryphal
Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses, leaves on the mind a strong impression
of the immeasurable superiority of the New Testament in purity and
truthfulness, simplicity and majesty; and this superiority points to a
special agency of the Spirit of God, without which that book of books
is an inexplicable mystery.

243 In this respect Baur differs
from the standpoint of Strauss, who in his first Leben
Jesu(1835) bad represented the gospel history as an innocent and
unconscious myth or poem of the religious imagination of the second
generation of Christians; but in his second Leben Jesu(1864) he
somewhat modified his view, and at last (1873) he gave up the whole
problem as a bad job. A tendency writing implies more or less conscious
fiction and falsification of history. The Tübingen critics,
however, try to relieve this fictitious literature of the odious
feature by referring us to the Jewish and Christian apocryphal
literature which was passed off under honored names without giving any
special offence on that score.

245 It is amusing to read
Renan’s account of this dispute (St. Paul, ch.
x.). He sympathizes rather with Peter, whom he calls a "man profoundly
kind and upright and desiring peace above all things," though he admits
him to have been amiably weak and inconsistent on that as on other
occasions; while he charges Paul with stubbornness and rudeness; but
what is the most important point, he denies the Tübingen
exegesis when he says: "Modern critics who infer from certain passages
of the Epistle to the Galatians that the rupture between Peter and Paul
was absolute, put themselves in contradiction not only to the Acts, but
to other passages of the Epistle to the Galatians (1:18; 2:2). Fervent
men pass their lives disputing together without ever falling out. We
must not judge these characters after the manner of things which take
place in our day between people well-bred and susceptible in a point of
honor. This last word especially never had much significance with the
Jews!"